April 19, 2014

And about time too but I am surprised at Abe Foxman, of all people, denouncing a practice that has earned him over half a million dollars a year for the whole of this century and a big chunk of the last one.

The Jews of Donetsk, Ukraine, were greeted on the eve of the Jewish
holiday of Passover with some deeply unsettling news. A flier apparently
on the official letterhead of the self-proclaimed, separatist Donetsk
People's Republic announced that all Jews must register with the government or face deportation and confiscation of their property.

And
yet unfortunately, this was just the latest escalation in a series of
political maneuvers in Ukraine where the anti-Semitism card has been
repeatedly overplayed.

Manufactured incidents of anti-Semitism
have been cynically used to discredit political opponents as
anti-Semites, whether they are, or not. In recent years, some Ukrainian
political operatives have spread rumors that opposing candidates are
Jews, likewise whether they are, or not.

Last year, political
operatives, presumably of deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych,
sent a dozen young men to an opposition rally with T-shirts that read "Beat the Jews!" on one side, and "Svoboda," the name of the ultra-nationalist opposition party, on the other.

Both
classical political anti-Semitism and the manufactured, manipulative
version rely on a common assumption, that a significant number of
Ukrainian citizens do not consider their Jewish compatriots to truly be
part of the Ukrainian nation.

That attitude, unfortunately, continues to play a significant role in the Ukrainian nationalist movement. The Svoboda party has a history of anti-Semitism and venerates Stepan Bandera,
a leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s.
Bandera allied with the Nazis during World War II when he thought it was
in the interest of his movement and was complicit in mass killings of
Jews and Poles by Ukrainian partisans.

When Jews are considered a
natural part of the Ukrainian nation, anti-Semitism in Ukraine should
wane and the temptation to use anti-Semitism in politics should follow.

And
that will be a relief, because anti-Semitism is a big enough problem
without having anyone with a political ax to grind add to it
artificially.